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2012 Faculty

Executive Director

Stephen Wolfram

Stephen Wolfram is the author of A New Kind of Science and the principal lecturer at the Summer School. He is the creator
of Mathematica, the creator of Wolfram|Alpha
and the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research. Having started in science as a
teenager (he got his PhD at age 20), Wolfram had a highly successful early career in academia. He began his work on
NKS in 1981 and spent ten years writing the NKS book, published in 2002. Over the course of 30 years, Wolfram has mentored
a large number of individuals who have achieved great success in academia, business and elsewhere. Starting the NKS
Summer School (now called the Wolfram Science Summer School) was his first formal educational undertaking in sixteen
years.

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Directors

Todd Rowland

Academic Director

Todd Rowland assisted Stephen Wolfram with mathematical issues found in A New Kind of Science chapters 5,
9 and 12.
Before joining the NKS team in 2001, he wrote entries for MathWorld.
Todd received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1999, where he studied traditional mathematics, such as algebraic
and differential geometry. Currently, he is the managing editor of Complex Systems.
His interests include the fundamental theory of physics, and more recently education, both NKS and the Wolfram Language.

Presentations

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Catherine Boucher

Program Director

Catherine Boucher joined Wolfram Research in 1998. She led project management during the production of A New Kind of Science and is currently the director of special projects for Wolfram Research. Her team is responsible for early development
of new initiatives at Wolfram Research, along with projects related to Wolfram Science. She and her team led the original
development of Wolfram|Alpha and currently handle its mathematical content and parser development. Catherine received
her PhD in applied mathematics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing
in cluster analysis.

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Abigail Devereaux

Event Director

Abigail Devereaux joined Wolfram Research in 2007. She has a bachelor's degree in physics (2004) and a master's degree
in mathematics (2007) from Boston University and is currently a Mercatus PhD Fellow in economics
at George Mason University.
She was involved in the Wolfram Science Summer School from 2008–2015 as event director, as a participant in 2008 and 2010, as a teaching assistant in 2011 and as an instructor from 2012–2015. Her presentation on cellular automata over graph topologies at the 2008 Midwest NKS Conference was later written into an article and
published in Complex Systems.
In her spare time she sings operatic soprano and writes speculative fiction.

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Instructors

Carlo Barbieri

Carlo Barbieri holds a PhD in physics from ENS in Paris. His current research
interests are on the boundary between physics, biology and informatics. During his thesis "Inverse problems in biophysics,"
he worked on developing algorithms to extract biologically relevant information from biophysics experiments such as
DNA micromanipulation or neural activity recordings. He spent one year as a visiting PhD student at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He earned a master's in physics from the University of Rome "La Sapienza",
in his hometown, focusing on Boolean satisfiability and the statistical physics of complex systems.

He now works for Wolfram in the Advanced Research Group, and has developed the automated data analysis functionality for Wolfram|Alpha. He now works on Wolfram Cloud features such as instant forms and APIs. He is a music lover, an avid traveler and a bike maniac. He finds it weird to talk about himself in the third person.

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Taliesin Beynon

Taliesin Beynon is a development lead in the advanced research group at Wolfram Research who works on deep learning functionality for the Wolfram Language. He studied honors math at the University of Cape Town.

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Erin Craig

Erin Craig graduated from New College of Florida with a BA in mathematics. Inspired by the beauty of both algebra and
automata, she spent her final year of college at University of California, Berkeley exploring an extension of rule
90 to cellular automata over non-Abelian groups. Erin attended the NKS Summer School in 2009, where she explored reducibility of string substitution systems.
She joined Wolfram Research as a software developer in 2009.

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Vitaliy Kaurov

Vitaliy Kaurov received his PhD in theoretical physics from the City University of New York in the area of ultra-cold
quantum gases, and also worked in the fields of complex systems and nonlinear dynamics. He collaborated in National
Science Foundation-sponsored research and was a professor at the College of Staten Island. Currently, he is a member of the Technical Communications and Strategy Group at Wolfram Research, publishes on the Wolfram Demonstrations Project
and writes for the Wolfram Blog. Vitaliy
attended the Wolfram Science Summer School 2010 as a student,
where he investigated the relation between 1D and 2D cellular automata. Since then, he has enjoyed returning to the
Summer School and teaching new students.

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Paul-Jean Letourneau

Paul-Jean Letourneau attended the NKS Summer School 2004, where he completed a pure NKS
project on elementary cellular automata with memory. He has been an instructor at the Summer School since 2005. His
2004 project developed into his master's thesis in theoretical physics,
"Statistical Mechanics of Cellular Automata with Memory." He has worked in several industrial and academic laboratories
around North America, where he made original contributions to real-world problems in medical imaging, geophysical seismic
imaging, protein structure prediction and DNA-protein interactions. Paul-Jean is now lead developer of computational
biology for Wolfram|Alpha.

Presentations

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Hernan Moraldo

Hernan Moraldo is a developer in Wolfram|Alpha's Advanced R&D Group (ARG). Within Wolfram|Alpha, he worked on many
projects related to parsing and data processing (also including some managing, briefly). Previously, he worked for
a number of years in the computer games industry, and was a cofounder and member of the board of the Argentine Game
Developers Association (ADVA in Spanish). He taught courses on computer game development and on artificial intelligence
for games at Universidad Maimónides, Instituto Image Campus and Escuela Da Vinci.

Hernan is greatly passionate about technology and innovation; he's especially interested in different forms of automation
(based on automatic data processing and analysis, language, vision, robotics, etc.). He lived most of his life in Buenos
Aires, Argentina, and is now living in Bariloche, Argentina.

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Eric Rowland

Eric Rowland is an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics at Hofstra University. He received his PhD from Rutgers University and held postdoctoral positions in the US, Canada and Belgium. He has coauthored over 30 research papers on topics in number theory, combinatorics and theoretical computer science, including several concerning cellular automata. In 2008 he proved that a simple recurrence discovered at the Summer School generates primes. He also develops mathematics content for Wolfram|Alpha.

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Matthew Szudzik

Matthew Szudzik made significant contributions to A New Kind of Science from 1998 through 2000 and during the summer of 2001 as a research assistant to Stephen Wolfram. His work focused primarily
on the analysis of simple programs and on the theoretical foundations of computational mathematics. He holds a PhD
in mathematical logic from Carnegie Mellon University. Matthew Szudzik has also
worked as a special lecturer and as an assistant teaching professor of mathematics at Carnegie Mellon's campuses in
Pennsylvania and Qatar.